Queen Victoria's sketch bag, Turner's fishing rod and a flayed criminal: the Royal Academy’s history in five objects

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Queen Victoria's sketch bag, 1800s. Victoria had been a keen artist since childhood and relished the opportunities to meet other artists that her role as Royal Patron offered. Given to the RA in 1906 by Edward VII, the bag contains blotting paper, pencils and her watercolour box.Credit:
Royal Academy Collection

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Charles Saumarez Smith takes Lucy Davies back 250 years to the birth of Britain’s most powerful arts club

On April 27 1769, Joshua Reynolds held a dinner at his grand town house on Leicester Square, as “a Treat occasioned by his being Knighted”. Strangely, given he was then England’s most prominent painter, he didn’t bother to invite any other artists, preferring to dine among more literary company, such as his close friends Samuel Johnson and the philosopher Edmund Burke. Johnson was in such high spirits that he ended his decade-long abstention from alcohol by drinking a glass of wine.

Reynolds’s knighthood was a reward for his efforts on behalf of the newly formed Royal Academy of Arts, of...